Latest BMC Mainframe Survey Points to Bright System z Future

BMC Software released its 8th annual mainframe survey, and the results shouldn’t surprise any readers of DancingDinosaur. Get a copy of the results here. The company surveyed over 1000 managers and executives at mainframe shops around the world, mostly BMC customers. Guess you shouldn’t be surprised at how remarkably traditional the respondents’ attitudes about the mainframe are.

For example, of the new areas identified by IBM as hot—mobile, cloud, big data, social business—cloud, big data, and mobile barely registered and social was nowhere to be seen. Cloud was listed as one of the top four priorities by 19% of the respondents. Big data was listed as one of the top priorities for the coming year by only 18% of the respondents, the same as mobile. The only topic that was less of a priority was outsourcing at 15%.

So what were the main priorities? The top four:

IT cost reduction—85% of respondents

Application availability—66%

Business/IT alignment—50%

Application modernization—50%

Where the researchers did drill down into one of the new areas of focus, big data, the biggest number of respondents, 31%, reported identifying the business use case as their biggest challenge. Other challenges were the cost of transforming/loading mainframe data to a centralized data warehouse (24%) followed by the effort such a transformation required (20%). Another 11% noted the lack of ETL tools for business analytics. Ten percent cited lack of knowledge about mainframe data content—huh? That might have been the one thing DancingDinosaur found truly surprising, although without knowing the specific job titles or job descriptions it might not be so surprising after all.

When it came to big data, 28% of the respondents expected to move mainframe data off the mainframe for analytics. An almost equal number (27%) expected the mainframe to act as the big data analytic engine. Another 12% reported federating data to an off platform analytics engine. Three percent reported Linux on z for hosting the unstructured data.

Moving data off the mainframe for big data analytics can be a slow and costly strategy. One of the benefits of doing big data on the System z or the hybrid zEnterprise/zBX is taking advantage of the proximity of the data. Moving petabytes or even terabytes of data is not a trivial undertaking. For all the hype it’s clear that big data as a business strategy is still in its infancy with much left to be learned. It will be interesting to see what this survey turns up a few years from now.

Otherwise, the survey results are very supportive to those who are fighting the seemingly perpetual battle of the mainframe as an end-of-life technology. Almost all the respondents (93%) considered the mainframe a long-term business strategy while almost half (49%) felt the mainframe will continue to grow and attract new workloads.

Some other tidbits from the survey:

70% of respondents said the mainframe will have a key role in Big Data plans.

76% of large shops expect MIPS capacity to grow as they modernize and add applications to address business needs. (This highlights the need for software that minimizes expensive MIPS consumption and exploits the mainframe’s cost-efficient specialty engines.)

No large shops anyway—and only 7% of all respondents—have plans to eliminate their mainframe environment. Glad it’s not worse.

Lastly, there still is time to register for IBM’s Enterprise 2013 conference in Orlando. It will combine the System z and the Power Systems technical universities with an Executive Summit. The session programs already are out for the System z and Power Systems tracks. Check out the System z overview here and the Power Systems overview here. DancingDinosaur will be there. In the coming weeks this blog will look more closely some intriguing sessions.

BTW–please follow DancingDinosaur at its new name on Twitter, @mainframeblog

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[…] annually reports on the survey findings. Find earlier DancingDinosaur survey reports here and here. If any readers want to participate in the survey the information to do so is below. The survey […]